You probably know this already, since it hasn't been featured on this blog's "you heard it here first" feature, but there are two huge experimental breakthroughs which managed to escape world governments without their budgets thoroughly mangled.
CERN is currently test-firing proton beams in sections of the 17 mile Large Hadron Collider, now that all of its 50,000 tons of magnets have been cooled to the appropriate temperatures (~456.3 deg. F). Scientists are confident that they will find the elusive Higgs Boson, a force-field-ish thingy supposedly responsible for the inexplicable phenomenon of mass, which you may have noticed around you throughout your daily life. There is also speculation that they could find evidence for unseen dimensions or supersymmetric particles that might bolster the case for string theory.
But hold on, the GLAST satellite is also chugging along as of early this summer. It's supposed to observe gamma rays (the highest frequency EM waves) at energies never before studied. Who gives a shit, right? Wrong. Proponents of opponents of string theory (most notably Loop Quantum Gravity) think that the fine-tuned measurements of the satellite might show minor discrepancies in the speed of light due to the motion of light particles across quantized spacetime. Basically, they want to prove that space and time are made of discrete units.
Oh snap! Two major quantum gravity theories are about to throw down all up in this bitch! It's exciting, we swear! Don't cut our funding!
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6 comments:
String cheese is a delectable, if somewhat predictable and arbitrary, treat.
i love this collider news. i was reading a lot about it earlier this summer under the bizarre impression that it might bring our world to an end, as some seemingly unrelated people in hawaii protested. cool.
string cheese can't be arbitrary, really.
Not the cheese itself, but the choice to consume it.
Time for you to install one of those newfangled Thinking Brains.
A lot of people thought the world would get sucked into a black hole created by the collider. It's technically possible to create one that would do that, but highly unlikely. And anyway that would be awesome.
i know, totally awesome.
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